Abstract
In the late nineteenth century, significant numbers of Persian books were printed in north India. The posthumous printing of the collected works of Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, a Persian scholar killed by British soldiers in 1857, is taken as a case study to demonstrate the importance of ustad-shagird (master-disciple) bonds in ensuring the continued attention to Persian. This study highlights the shifting centres of Persian language activity as different groups entered the arena of Persian print to carve out cosmopolitan and multidirectional identities for themselves in a period when, it is usually assumed, such identities became hardened along ethnic, religious and class lines.
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Notes
- 1.
Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual Literary History? Lessons from Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century North India’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 49:2 (2012), pp. 225–246; Muzaffar Alam, ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, 32:2 (1998), pp. 317–349.
- 2.
For example, see: Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual Literary History?’; Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Kumkum Chatterjee, The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 3.
Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). For Muslim responses to 1857 and its aftermath, see: Crispin Bates (ed.), Mutiny at the Margins (Vol. v), Muslim, Dalit and Subaltern Narratives (New Delhi: SAGE, 2014).
- 4.
Frances Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Francesca Orsini, Between Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009); Margrit Pernau and Helge Jordheim (eds.) Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 5.
See, for instance: Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity; Safdar Ahmed, ‘Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 35:2 (2012), pp. 434–455; Rizwan Ahmed, ‘Scripting a New Identity: The battle for Devanagari in nineteenth-century India’, The Journal of Pragmatics, 40:7 (2008), pp. 1163–1183.
- 6.
Although many presses and businesses had suffered in the immediate aftermath of the Rebellion, the publishing industry made a quick comeback. See: Selections from the Records of Government, North Western Provinces, Part XXII (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1858), p. 43.
- 7.
Joshi, Fractured Modernity, p. 8.
- 8.
Francesca Orsini, ‘How to Do Multilingual Literary History?’
- 9.
‘Sahbai’ was Imam Bakhsh’s nom de plume. Henceforth, nom de plumes are indicated by quotation marks the first time they appear.
- 10.
It is not certain whether the second volume of Sahbai’s Kullīyāt was issued from the Nizami press; the only surviving edition was published at the Naval Kishore Press: Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, Kullīyāt-i Sahbai (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1880).
- 11.
Princely states were indirectly administered by the British colonial state in India, as they were ruled by Indian royalty and thus had a certain amount of autonomy.
- 12.
‘Rekhta’ (lit. ‘mixed’) refers to a genre of Hindi/Urdu poetry written in a highly Persianised register, which came to be conflated with Urdu in the twentieth century. See: Safdar Ahmed, ‘Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry’, pp. 434–455; Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, Kullīyāt-i Sahbai, ed. Din Dayal (Kanpur: Nizami Press, 1878), Vol. 1, p. 811.
- 13.
Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal, for the year 1839–1840 (Calcutta: Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1841) Appendix V, p. xxiv. Hamid Ali Khan was the son-in-law of Nawab Itimad ud-Daulah of Lucknow, who had bequeathed a sum of money to the Delhi College. Hamid Ali Khan was in charge of Itimad ud-Daulah’s property in Delhi, and was also a patron of the Shia community of Delhi. See: Ebba Koch, ‘The Madrasa of Ghaziu’d-Din Khan at Delhi’, in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 21.
- 14.
Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal, for the year 1839–1840, p. xxxi.
- 15.
His Urdu works were: Intikhab-i Dawāwīn (Selections from dīwāns; 1842); Qawai’d-i Sarf wa Nahw-I Urdu (Rules of Urdu Grammar; n.d.); Tarjumah-i Hada’iq al-Balaghat (Translation of Shams ud-Din Faqir Dehlvi’s eighteenth-century work on Persian prosody and rhetoric; 1842). [Do you have dates for these – if not put in a line to indicate that].
- 16.
Muhammad Zakir Husain, Imam Bakhsh Sahbai ki adabi khidmāt (Patna: n.p. unknown, 2002), p. 122.
- 17.
For example, Risāla-i ḥarf-i Farsi (‘Treatise on Persian Letters’). See: Sahbai, Vol. I, p. 101.
- 18.
The authorship of Mina Bazar is disputed; however, many scholars (including Sahbai) believed that Nur-ud-Din Zuhuri (d. 1615) was the author of the work. See: C. M. Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i: Teacher, scholar, poet and puzzle-master’, in The Delhi College: Traditional elites, the Colonial State and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 167.
- 19.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, Vol. I, pp. 53–219 (under the heading ‘Bayāẓ-i Shauq Payam’).
- 20.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, Vol. I, pp. 237–298.
- 21.
Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i’, pp. 145–187.
- 22.
Some of these works, such as Risāla Qaul Faisal were distributed for free, indicating that they were published at the expense of Sahbai’s patrons, and not seen as a viable source of profit by the College press. See: Selections from the Records of Government, North Western Provinces, Vol. III, Part XIL. (Agra: Secundra Orphan Press, 1855), p. 255.
- 23.
Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i’, p. 152.
- 24.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 114–117.
- 25.
Zakir Husain give a list of 57 individuals who he believes were students of Sahbai’s at one point or another. Husain, Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, pp. 50–70.
- 26.
Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Kullīyāt-i Maktubāt, ed. and trans. Pertau Rohilla (Islamabad: National Book Foundation, 2009), pp. 295–296.
- 27.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 5.
- 28.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 149.
- 29.
Dharam Narain was also the editor of the Urdu journal, Qiran us-Sa’adain, issued from the Delhi College press. See: M. Ikram Chaghatai, ‘Dr. Aloys Sprenger and the Delhi College’, in The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State and Education before 1857, ed. Margrit Pernau, pp. 105–124. The journal has also been the subject of excellent research. For example, see: Gail Minault, ‘Qiran al-Sa’adain: The Dialogue between Eastern and Western Learning at the Delhi College’, in Perspectives of Mutual Encounter in South Asian History, ed. Jamal Malik (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 260–277.
- 30.
Selections from the Records (1855), p. 260.
- 31.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 150.
- 32.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 53–219.
- 33.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 140–149.
- 34.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 140–149. The reference to the huma can also be read as a reference to Alavi’s spiritual guidance: The huma had the ability to bestow kingship on those who came under its shade as it flew across the world, but this ‘kingship’ can also be interpreted as the attainment of spiritual and/or intellectual heights.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ghalib, Kullīyāt, p. 324.
- 37.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 141–197.
- 38.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 160. N.B. ʻInāyat-nāma can also mean certificate, but in this case, Sahbai is referring to a letter from his patron.
- 39.
Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolary Gift, the Editorial Third-Party, Counter-Epistolaria: Rethinking the Epistolarium’, Life Writing, 8:2 (2011), pp. 135–152. In this piece, Stanley draws on Marcel Mauss to study the letters of the South African novelist, Olive Schreiner. Although Stanley’s analysis of the ‘epistolarium’ does not deal with the Persianate world, these insights are certainly relevant for an understanding of nineteenth-century Indo-Persian networks and styles of correspondence, and the sometimes baffling lack of ‘content’ they displayed.
- 40.
This debate has been the subject of much recent interest. See: Mana Kia, Contours of Persianate Community, 1722–1835. PhD thesis (Harvard University, 2011); Arthur Dudney, A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhan-i Arzu’s Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World. PhD thesis (Columbia University, 2013).
- 41.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 204.
- 42.
Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i’, p. 172.
- 43.
United Provinces. Education Department: Report on public instruction in the United Provinces, 1847/48–1850/51, IOR/V/24/906, Asia and Africa Collections, British Library, p. 67.
- 44.
Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 28. See also: Margrit Pernau, Ashraf into Middle-Classes: Muslim in Nineteenth-Century Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 84–85.
- 45.
Pritchett, Nets of Awareness, p. 154.
- 46.
Naim, ‘Shaikh Imam Bakhsh Sahba’i’, p. 171; Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 5.
- 47.
Nawab Siddiq Hasan Khan was erroneously labelled a Wahhabi, although he was in fact a proponent of the Ahl-i Hadith school of thought. See: Seema Alavi, ‘Siddiq Hasan Khan (1832–90) and the Creation of a Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the 19th century’, Journal of the Economic and Social history of the Orient, 54:1 (2011), pp. 1–38.
- 48.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 771–809.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Siddiq Hasan Khan, Shama‘-i Anjuman (Bhopal: Matba’-i Shahjahani, 1876), p. 262.
- 53.
Alavi, ‘Siddiq Hasan Khan’, pp. 33–34.
- 54.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 773–774.
- 55.
Hayden Bellenoit, ‘Paper, Pens and Power between Empires in North India, 1750–1850’, South Asian History and Culture, 3:3 (July 2012), pp. 348–372.
- 56.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 5.
- 57.
Alavi, ‘Siddiq Hasan Khan’, pp. 15–17.
- 58.
Khan, Shama’-i Anjuman (p?)
- 59.
Claudia Preckel, The Begums of Bhopal (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2000), p. 133.
- 60.
Barbara Daly Metcalf, ‘Islam and Power: The Making and Unmaking of a Muslim Princess’, American Historical Review, 116:1 (2011), pp. 1–30.
- 61.
Din Dayal had read out the important declaration conferring the status of Nawab upon Siddiq Hasan Khan after his marriage to Shahjahan Begum. See: Shahjahan Begum, The Taj-ul Ikbal Tarikh Bhopal, or, The History of Bhopal, trans. H. C Barstow (Calcutta: Thacker and Spink, 1876), p. 157.
- 62.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, pp. 771–772.
- 63.
Hannah L. Archambault, ‘Becoming Mughal in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of the Bhopal Princely State’, Journal of South Asian Studies, 36:4 (2013), pp. 479–495.
- 64.
Ibid.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Ibid. See also: Shahjahan, Taj-ul Ikbal, p. 85. Here Shahjahan Begum mentions that during her visit to Kanpur, she and her mother received many invitations from eminent personalities in the city. However, the only one they accepted was from Abdur Rahman, the proprietor of the Nizami Press.
- 67.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 809.
- 68.
In 1856, the Nawabs of Lucknow were deposed and Avadh came under direct British rule. For a history of Islamic reform in Bhopal, see: Preckel, The Begums of Bhopal. P?
- 69.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 4.
- 70.
Sahbai, Kullīyāt, p. 780.
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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their valuable feedback. I am also especially grateful to Dr. Daniel Grey, Danielle Dunbar and Michael Taylor for reading and commenting on this essay.Throughout this essay, all Persian words, with the exception of individual’s names, have been transliterated according to the scheme followed in: Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English dictionary, including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1892). For ease of reference, titles of Persian works have been translated to match existing references to them in English.
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Shah, Z. (2017). ‘Bringing Spring to Sahbai’s Rose-Garden’: Persian Printing in North India after 1857. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_8
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